Yahoo called out on “state sponsored hack”

Troubled search outfit Yahoo has been called out over its claim that it was the victim of a state sponsored hacker in 2014.

Yahoo got into all sorts of hot water after it was revealed that it had been hacked a while ago and forgot to tell anyone It appeared to make matters worse by implying that it was not a regular common garden hack that bought its security to its knees but one of those government hacks which are impossible to stop.

According to InfoArmor, which claims to have some of the stolen information the hack was carried out by a bunch of hackers whose main clients are spammers. “Group E,” a team of five professional hackers believed to be from Eastern Europe and are not backed by any government at all.

Andrew Komarov, InfoArmor’s chief intelligence officer claimed that Group E was behind high-profile breaches at LinkedIn, Dropbox and Tumblr. To sell that information, the team has used other hackers, such as Tessa88 and peace_of_mind, to offer the stolen goods on the digital black market.

“The group is really unique,” Komarov said. “They’re responsible for the largest hacks in history, in term of users affected.”

InfoArmor’s claims dispute Yahoo’s contention that a “state-sponsored actor” was behind the data breach, in which information from 500 million user accounts was stolen. Some security experts have been skeptical of Yahoo’s claim and wonder why the company isn’t offering more details.

The database that InfoArmor has contains only “millions” of accounts, but it includes the users’ login IDs, hashed passwords, mobile phone numbers and zip codes, Komarov said.

The security firm says it obtained the data from “operative sources” about a week ago and has verified that the account information is real. Komarov wouldn’t say more about how InfoArmor got the data.

Group E has sold the stolen Yahoo database in three private deals, Komarov said. At one point, the Yahoo database was sold for at least $300,000, he said. His firm has been monitoring the group’s activities for more than three years.